This morning TechCrunch published an article by Brian Solis entitled Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere? It was a great read not only because it nicely illustrates how the Web is evolving into a highly flexible and inclusive organism, but also really validates the reasons behind our existence as a company and what we’re working on. (Thanks, Brian!)
Technorati gets a lot of flack for the shortcomings of their service, (they did respond to the TechCrunch article). From our perspective, however, Technorati was the best tool for what it measured in its time. But times have changed, and links are but one of many important metrics behind the big picture of publisher/audience engagement now.
As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) – an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.
We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.
There is a lot to unpack here. The quote initially covers the juggernaut of information sources online — blogs being only one. Combating this was the catalyst behind the founding of AideRSS.
Too many blogs, too many posts, not enough time. Just tell me what I need to know. And that is the problem we’ve addressed with the filtering and customization functionality on our website, with our Firefox and Google Reader extensions, and with our widget.
The quote goes on to comment on the evolution and proliferation of social networking sites and tools, the development of which are inextricably linked to the proliferation of blogs and pretty much every other kind of information online. Not only are people using these sites and tools to publish, they’re using them to respond and share.
A service that only measures links ignores all of this communication and sharing. We don’t.
We continually work on adding more metrics sources to our PostRank analysis to get not only a good cross-section of social site types, but also geographies. As much as it sometimes seems that the Web has become completely global and homogenous, influential social, sharing, and microblogging sites in North America might not have the same reach in Brazil, or Russia, or Japan.
As the article also notes, these sites not only speed up our ability to communicate – to blog and share interesting information or find resources – it has also sped up and expanded our ability to respond to others’ content.
Now, we have the ability to instantly interact with, respond, or promote blog content away from the source blog, but that shouldn’t make the original post any less valuable. In fact, while blog authority isn’t capitalizing on these new sources for linkbacks, link authority is still affected, no matter the source, and helps increase the visibility and weight of the host blog in search engines.
The immediacy of publishing, sparking dialog, and receiving responses only reinforces this behavior. And, it encourages participation without having to write a blog post tracking back to the originator of each discussion. So, posts are missing out on a trove of valuable linklove from other blogs that would otherwise have contributed to their authority.
Finding out how who’s been linking to you, or how many links your content has generated over the past few months is nice, but only as a retroactive measurement. Potential advertisers may care how “popular” you were last month. Your audience/customers? Less likely. Relying on link-based metrics causes publishers to miss out on a trove, alright, but a trove of information and interaction a whole lot more valuable than linklove.
Nowadays, by the time your Google or TweetBeep alert arrives, the opportunity to answer questions, respond to criticism, or otherwise participate in conversations with your audience may already have passed.
Because of the importance of keeping up with the velocity of audience engagement, we’ve focused a lot of work on making our services real-time. PostRank metrics show you where and how people are engaging with your content immediately, which is great for customer service, information sharing, and really interesting conversations.
And real-time engagement metrics are only the first step in using what we’ve learned and the data we’ve gathered to help publishers make sense and make use of when, where, and how their audiences are engaging with their content. We’ve got bigger plans.
We think publishers’ authority should come from their entire audience, not just those who happen to publish and maintain blogs.
In closing, the TechCrunch article notes:
But forget about blogs. This discussion begets a bigger question. Will we need a separate Technorati-type index for measuring the authority of content publishers on Twitter and other micro-media in their own right? Of course we do.
We couldn’t agree more, though I’m not sure segregating authority by service (e.g. “Twitter authority”) is quite the answer. We don’t need more fragmentation in trying to manage our information and relationships.
What the Web still lacks, to a large degree, is cohesiveness. A holistic resource that shares who people are, what they do, what they know, and how influential they are. And that influence (aka authority) should be judged by those who publishers make efforts to reach — their audience — regardless of where that audience chooses to live and work online.
To that end, we’ve got some really interesting plans. We hope you’ll find them interesting (and, more importantly, useful) as well. Stay tuned.